Once you remember that this passionate love poem written by a proper (spinster)
woman in Puritan-ish New England of 1862, you understand why Dickinson kept so
many of her poems secret—and why the uncensored versions took decades to emerge
after Dickenson’s death. The speaker in this poem begins almost breathlessly. She
and her lover have embraced, and this experience has transfigured her. She
likens her passion in the final stanza to an almost religious level.

It’s hard to imagine a
simpler and more direct opening than “He touched me.” It’s both confessional
and wondering. The second line tells us that this was a once-in-a-lifetime
occurrence: the day when this happened, when this embrace was “permitted” will
be something she will remember all her life. We know there was passion for it
wasn’t a chaste embrace, but one where she “groped upon his breast,” and here I
picture her clutching him as if she could not get enough.

She was over-awed by
the experience. Within his embrace (“a boundless place” as if it were all
emcompassing) she was silenced, just as a small stream is silenced as it is
embraced by the “awful [awe-full] Sea.” She doesn’t say how her lover
responded. This poem is all about the difference this encounter made in the
speaker’s life. She is “different from before” now as if she had breathed
heavenly air or touched a monarch. Even her face is transfigured into something
more tender and loveable.

Dickinson concludes the
poem by reflecting on the day and the embrace as if it were a religious
experience. If she could come again into the haven, the “Port” that is her
beloved, she would be even more “ravished” or joyful than Rebecca from the
biblical book of Genesis (ch. 24). Rebecca was a young woman selected to be the
wife of Isaac, the young son of Abraham. She had to travel many days to reach
and marry him, no doubt in great anticipation of his reputed goodness, his
wealth and position—and her own, as his wife—and also in prayerful joy at being
reportedly chosen by God. This journey towards Jerusalem must have been exciting for her. Isaac was waiting for the
caravan to return with a bride, and so as soon as he saw the camels, he ran out
into the road to meet them. Rebecca, as shy and proper as Dickinson, covered
herself with a veil. That story ends happily, for Isaac loved Rebecca and she
lived a long and fruitful life.

Mithras, Persian sun god--looking a lot like the Statue of Liberty!

The second religious
image is a little more difficult. Who is the “Persian, baffled at her shrine”?
And why would she lift a crucifix to “her imperial Sun”? One interpretation
that a few scholars have suggested is that the Persian is Lalla Rookh, a young
princess who travels from Delhi to Cashmere to meet her betrothed. Along the
way she falls in love with a poet story teller who fortunately turns out to be
the bridegroom in disguise. This interpretation has the benefit of offering a
parallel with Rebecca’s journey, but suffers from involving an Indian rather
than a Persian, as well as not addressing the idea of the Sun. Instead, I
suggest that the Persian is a woman praying at a Mithraic shrine. Mithra was
worshipped for hundreds of years as a sun god, beginning in India and Persia
but ultimately spreading throughout the Roman Empire. Imagine the woman praying
in her ordinary way and then suddenly seeing her sun god in front of her. She
raises a sacred token in awe. That token would look much like the cross
Dickinson might have worn, as the tau cross was a symbol of Mithras (as well as
Tammuz, the Sumerian sun god).

The poem’s speaker,
then, is claiming she would be so moved, so ravished, to take port once again
in her lover’s arms that she would exceed Rebecca’s joy and the Persian woman’s
amazed reverence in the presence of her god.

Most of the imagery in
this poem has been seen in earlier poems. The special day when the two lovers
shared their love and exchanged crucifixes was described in “There
came a Day—at Summer's full” (F325) where “Each was to each—the sealed
church, / Permitted to commune this—time—,” just as the lovers in this poem
have their glorious “permitted” day. At the end of their allotted time, “when
all the time had failed— / Without external sound— / Each—bound the other’s
Crucifix— / We gave no other Bond.” The bond was that after death they would
have a “new marriage” that would be an eternal one.

The
idea that the loved man is a sun god, or at least that the sun represents the
loved man was explored in “The
Daisy follows soft the Sun” where the little daisy “Sits shyly” at the
sun’s feet at night, braving his irritation, in hopes of “Night’s possibility.”
In “The Sun—just touched the Morning,” Dickinson describes a morning so excited
about having been touched by the sun that she “felt herself supremer— / A
Raised—Ethereal Thing!” just as in the current poem the speaker feels
uplifted by the touch of her beloved.

Dickinson, ultimately, would be the Seaand any beloved only a small stream--althoughshe thought it the reverse.

The speaker’s sense of being silenced as she joins her small stream to
her beloved’s greater Sea is also seen in “The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea—
/ Forgets her own locality— / As I, in Thee” (F255)
The same notion is expressed in “My
River runs to thee” (F219)
and “Least Rivers—docile to some sea” (F206).
This last poem was part of a letter to Samuel Bowles. It is very likely that
Bowles was the beloved referred to here and that he was also the “Master” she
wrote three very passionate (and probably unposted) letters to.

Structurally,
the poem is written in three six-line stanzas, although the first one is
separated in two parts for emphasis. The first stanza tells the reader about
the day of the embrace and what it was like. The second describes the speaker’s
transfiguration, and the third the joy she expects when she finally comes to
the Port that is her beloved—probably in the eternal marriage she alluded to in
“There came a day” (as well as in “Title divine, is mine”).

Each
stanza has two rhyming iambic tetrameter lines followed by an iambic trimeter
line—both of which rhyme. The result is a very tightly knit poem. The caesuras
indicated by commas and dashes give a very spoken quality to the poem as if the
poet is recounting something wistfully to the reader, something she has said
and thought many times before. “He touched me…” –a memory never to be
forgotten.

2 comments:

So she uses her love for Bowles as the force by which she can leap from the passion of human love to her real subject: love of god and how it transforms her beyond herself (again and again). It amazes me to read how absolutely unabashed she is in expressing and embodying this all-consuming love. I wonder if her heart in her poems would have been less exposed had she sought a wider audience.

Poem F 1038

Great Nature not to disappointAwaiting Her that Day —To be a Flower, is profoundResponsibility —

The Dickinson Blog Project

I plan to read and comment on all of Emily Dickinson's 1789 poems in chronological order. Scroll down to see earlier poems, or else browse the Archives. You can also use the Search function (below the Header). I think this is going to be a wonderful adventure!

I'm using R.W. Franklin's Reading Edition of the collected poems. I title the poems by the first line and at the end of the poem identify its Franklin number (e.g., F220) followed by the date Franklin assigns, and then by the numbers assigned by Thomas H. Johnson.